Talkin' bout a revolution

The day after we walked a lot at Disneyland we spent the day at Versailles... also walking a lot. Perhaps not the best itinerary planning but it's what we did.

We visited Versailles Palace when we were in France seven years ago but we were on a coach tour which spent the morning at Monet's Garden and the afternoon at the palace. The weather was awful so, apart from rushing through the palace itself, we never got a chance to explore the gardens. Versailles, we have always said, was top of the list to spend a full day exploring if ever we returned.

So, how did Versailles rate on our return visit? More specifically, how did Teneille rate Versailles on our return visit? Well, she rated it five out five red squirrels. That is, while in the gardens at Versailles and further afield in the gardens of the Petit Trianon we saw five squirrels so, of course, that is the favourite part of Teneille's trip. Just like seven years ago when I secretly planned for two years a two-week trip to her dream destination of Paris for her 30th birthday and the best thing that happened was seeing a cow that let her touch it. Coincidentally, that was also the same day we visited Versailles on the last trip.

But we aren't up to the squirrels yet. First we jumped on a train to Versailles and walked past some random building next to the station which Teneille asked if that was the palace. Ah, no dear. That building is a basic bitch. Let's just walk around this corner and be blinded by all the gold adorning the actual palace.

A return to Versailles and the sun was shining.

We arrived in Versailles on schedule and the line to get in wasn't too bad. We spent a good few hours exploring the palace apartments, meeting rooms and galleries which seven years ago we had practically run through to make it back to a bus on time. The apartments, the Hall of Mirrors and the council rooms remain much as I remembered them. Not quite as plush as the Napoleonic apartments at the Louvre but still, the ornate carvings and artworks that run up the walls and across the ceilings are amazing. To think the palace was added to over and over again as new monarchs to control - it doesn't look like a building that was pieced together bit by bit. Even the most famous room in the palace - the Hall of Mirrors - started life as an open-air balcony of sorts that was eventually closed in a reworked due to that side of the palace capturing all the bad weather.

Places like Versailles are one of the reasons I love Paris so much. The amount of history you walk through on a daily basis is mindboggling. We just don't have that kind of history in Australia with our architecture. The fact that the start of the French revolution in 1789 and the World War I armistice signing in 1918 came to pass within the same walls at Versailles, a place that existed since 1631, is a level of history outside that of Indigenous Australians I struggle to imagine.

The Hall of Mirrors.

Don't know how I'd go to sleep each night staring up at ceilings like that.

Like everywhere else we've been this trip, Versailles was bloody crowded so we were happy to escape into the gardens where we could find our own space.

The size of the gardens to the west of the palace is crazy. Some 800 hectares of manicured paths, hedges, gardens, lawns and fountains. It would be easy to get lost without a map or a phone if you also lost site of the palace as a point of reference.

The gardens were quite peaceful once you removed all the people.

We walked through the Queen's Grove - a portion of the gardens created in 1776 so Marie-Antionette had somewhere to walk without the intrusion of visitors. The Queen's Grove will also be recorded in history as the place Teneille saw her first red squirrel.

We saw Latona fountain, a water feature surrounded by gold statures of humans as they are being slowly transformed into frogs because they said some not nice things about the child of a woman who had an affair with a god. She called down the wrath of the father to transform the peasants. Seems like a reasonable response.

Latona Fountain and it's weird frog people.

We stopped at the Mirror Pool to see a water show and Teneille's second red squirrel.

We admired the Colonnade Grove that included a central statue of Pluto trying to abduct some poor woman. Hasn't anyone told him he's not a planet anymore and to get back in his box?

We saw Apollo's Fountain, with the golden statues of the god and his chariot horses about to raise the sun. Apollo is a recurring theme in Versailles because Louis XIV took the god as his emblem and used as many sculptures and artworks as he could to liken himself to the deity.

The water show at the Mirror Pool.

Apollo's Fountain was pretty special when the sunlight hit the gold figures.

Apollo's Fountain is the bottom most end of the gardens and it was here we hired a couple of bikes to get over to the Petit Trianon. You'll know the Petit Trianon because it is smaller than the Grande Trianon. The bigger of the Trianons was basically a smaller palace for the royals to stay at when the supreme palace of Versailles was too much. The smaller of the Trianons was for the queen because of course she needed her own mini-palace when she didn't want to be in the supreme palace or the grand palace.

Anyone wondering why the French people rose up against the monarchy, talkin' bout a revolution need only visit Versailles. One walk through the extravagance and vastness of the castle and the gardens and the smaller castle down the road if you didn't like the big castle and then the even smaller castle next to that one for the queen and you think, 'yeah, I get it'.

How lucky that grape vine was growing in just the right spot?!

Teneille has quite an interest in Madame de Pompadour so was keen to visit the Petit Trianon. She was Louis XV's mistress and such was her standing with the monarch he had the Petit Trianon built for her. Madame de Pompadour died before the property was finished and so it fell to Marie-Antionette instead. It is in interesting property and although never intended to be hers, Marie-Antoinette's stamp is all over it. The staircase railings literally include her initials in the design. At the far edge of the Petit Trianon gardens (which are also frigging massive, can I just say) is a small cottage the queen wanted built so she could escape her courtly lifestyle. She even organised for it to be built as a working farm so she could enjoy the authenticity of not being a queen in a palace.

We saw three more squirrels on the grounds of the Petit Trianon, including two which chased each other playfully down a tree much to Teneille's delight.

Oh look, a working farm to make queens feel a little less queenly when the queendom becomes too queensome.

Having returned our bikes and re-entered the Versailles gardens, we began winding our was back towards the palace. We saw more groves - including an artificially created cliff face with caves housing more statues of Apollo - and ticked off the more fountains from our list - including the last of the four fountains in the garden representing the seasons.

By the time we got a train back into Paris and returned to the apartment we had walked about 19,000 steps. That was 40,000-45,000 steps in two days after factoring in Disneyland the day before. Our feet hurt.

Time to soak our feet in water and our mouths in wine. Au revoir.